Britain’s other housing crisis – spiked

Let me open with an obvious point: Britain doesn’t have enough homes for its ever-growing population. Houses are in such demand that prices remain completely detached from average wages across most of the country; young adults are postponing family formation; and plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds are forced to live a sort of forever adolescence as they stay at home or live in the equivalent of student digs for years.

In response, we rightly hear how the crisis could be eased by an increased programme of house building across the nation. However, I submit we should also give far more attention to our existing housing stock – indeed, to many of the historic buildings this proud nation boasts.

Planning reforms are overdue, and we will need new developments to form part of any lasting solution to our low housing stock. Yet we run the risk of becoming so fixated on building afresh that we neglect the buildings we have. Across the country, Victorian and Georgian properties are falling into disrepair. I live in one – my own Victorian Glasgow tenement is undergoing ruinously expensive repairs at the moment (each of the eight owners has had to pay about 50 per cent of the value of their flats to fix them after decades of inattention from those in charge of the block).

This disregard is visible on any high street in any market town up and down the country, as upper floors above shops remain pretty rotten looking. Council or previously council-owned estates are in a parlous state. Indeed, a recent parliamentary report suggested that bringing historic buildings – including vacant upper floors above shops, former mills and civic buildings – back into use could create as many as 670,000 homes. Meanwhile, around four million homes in England fail the Decent Homes Standard, and nearly 94,000 social homes sit vacant, many awaiting repairs, despite chronic housing shortages. We have become strangely comfortable allowing perfectly serviceable buildings to decay while insisting that the only answer is to pour more concrete on to green fields. 

The pattern is unfortunately not limited to housing. Eight years after the first devastating fire that gutted it, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art is still behind hoardings, and recent headlines suggest it may stay that way. We don’t have the wherewithal or imagination to repair it, despite it arguably being Scotland’s Notre Dame.

We’ve also seen historic churches disappearing at an alarming rate in the UK – over 3,500 churches have closed during the past 15 years or so. There are almost 1,000 churches and chapels in England currently deemed ‘at risk’ because of historical neglect.

The closing down and / or dilapidation of our churches is as clear a symbol we have of Britain’s awkward relationship with its own architectural inheritance. Some of these closed churches have become cafés or libraries, which is fine in its own way. They at least continue to provide a sense of civic togetherness, a congregationalist element.

Some have been converted into mosques. Former churches now cater to Muslim congregations in Stoke-on-Trent, Blackburn, Ipswich and many more places besides. Bradford’s Islamic population is now catered for by a landmark ‘mega mosque’, a conversion of the historic, beautiful and gigantic Heaton Mount university site into the newly minted ‘Mustafa Mount’. It seems that newer non-native religious communities have a confidence that many traditional Christian institutions lack, unable as they are simply to maintain the buildings they already possess.

None of this shows us as a nation willing to conserve its inheritance. We have become willing – or at least passive enough – to accept the really quite rapid disappearance of buildings and attendant institutions that previous generations spent centuries creating. It’s an aesthetic loss, for sure – it’s also an erosion of the character of the places around it, and a weakening of the sense that Britain is a civilisation with something worth preserving.

Conservation is not an indulgence. It is a recognition of the fact that a civilisation will always inherit far more than it creates. As Burke famously argued, society is a partnership ‘between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. Our buildings are a clear expression of that partnership. They show off generational craftsmanship (much of which is also disappearing), reflect local traditions and give us a sense of permanence in a world beset with a feeling of ennui and transience.

It’s no coincidence that Victorian terraces, Georgian crescents and Scottish tenements are some of the country’s most sought-after homes (before we realised the state it was in, my wife and I were besotted by our beautiful flat with all its period features). And they were built to last in a way that modern homes are not, as an architect friend of mine assures me.

Perhaps top of all points in favour of looking after our historic homes, they are already there. We don’t have to carve up greater swathes of the country to house our ever-growing population. As we’ve seen, more than half a million extra homes are already there for the taking, if only we had the will to breathe some life back into them.

So can we please have a conversation about memory in tandem with a conversation on housing? A nation confident in its future (which I would argue we are not, but which we should and could be) will always build the homes it needs for its citizens. A confident nation will also cherish what previous generations have gifted it. In continuing to neglect our architectural inheritance, we should not be surprised when the generations who follow us inherit not only fewer homes, but also a poorer country, less rooted in itself.

James Dixon is a Glasgow-based novelist, poet and playwright.